When I work with a company from the inception, I usually try to sync with the founders to understand what the company wants to become, what they think it will represents to its customers, and what will propel the idea to success, as well as what could hinder it.
I refer to this foundation as tone and personality, or archetype development. This ground work has also been used by modern advertising and is based on Carl Jung’s theories of the collective unconscious. These archetypes or ideals, are characters we model ourselves after and that we may subconsciously attach to other people, places, things, including businesses and products we use. I work with stakeholders to understand if a company’s main offering or product, is going to care for people, (The Caregiver) entertain them, (The Jester), unleash their creativity (The Artist), or enhance their lives by dramatically saving them time or money (The Hero, maybe also The Magician).
Here is a clear visual showing the 12 archetypes I employ. The post where the image originated is linked here.
This archetype can be established temporarily through a simple small meeting, a more structured day workshop with stakeholders, or a more robust analysis involving a survey of customers, employees and stakeholders followed by an in-depth 2-day workshop reviewing the results and establishing direction on company vision, mission, tone, and all content essentially. All content means marketing strategies, aesthetics for every public and internal design item, e.g. uniforms, office design, stationary design etc. I especially employ these decisions for tone on interfaces such as error messages, important email alerts, complex signup or registration flow, educational callouts and variations on landing pages and more.
For ConsenSys’s Token Foundry, it took the form of small tactical discussions leading quickly into establishing a tone and personality, which moved to logo iterations the very same day. The beauty here is that the team is laser focusing their instincts on an ideal without over thinking it. I will keep the exact archetype decision they settled on out of this post, out of respect for ConsenSys’s intellectual property, but I will share my process and thoughts on the very first graphics and interfaces designed.
Some very early sketches suggested it may be interesting to use the “T” and “F” as a combined element, and balance them evenly with each other, even over lap them. I started with a 32px X 32px grid in Adobe Illustrator, created a circle and square as a balancing area guide and started creating asymmetrical configurations using a “T” and “F”.
Through careful type placement, diverse color explorations and frankly some some dead ends, a very simple mark and type treatment started to appear.
When I came to the above options I stopped.
Usually a logo accompanies a homepage, business card, or an animation, so to finalize the decision I wanted to see the logo variations actually within the homepage and design them together.
While designing elements together, I like to contrast page elements slightly to make for a more compelling design. For example, if the logo has heavily rounded corners or an organic fluid feel, any other page elements such as graphics, buttons, modals or prompts, may have very sharp corners and edges. Or vice versa.
Ultimately, I settled on the sharper more abstracted “TF” combination. I had envisioned it sitting on a page or with other collateral as the sharp form contrasted by more organic, curvey and soft graphics and interface elements.
I offered these options to the team and they happily settled on the darker aesthetic and a softer version of the logo.
